FriendFeed As FoeFeed

Here’s a practical tip on how to use the new web service called FriendFeed to solve a real business problem: opposition research.  Every startup "tracks" news from or about their competitors, usually in the form of an email sent to a few folks within the company with the subject, "Did you see this?" 

Well FriendFeed allows a single person or a group of people to aggregate information and share it with each other (publicly or privately).  It’s more than just copy-paste, FriendFeed allows users to permanently track specific feeds (like a competitor’s blog) as well as one-off stories (like a TechCrunch review).  FriendFeed allows users to track all kinds of media (blog, video, pictures, etc.) from scores of sources (Flickr, Typepad, Youtube, etc.) and usability is superb.  Users can view the feed as a web page or RSS feed and multiple "rooms" (feeds) are easily configurable.

So do yourself a favor and fire your $10K per month PR firm that provides you with daily news snippets and build your own FoeFeed.